Tuesday, October 30, 2007

First Post

Welcome to the PyPy status blog. After we got a lot of positive feedback about the blog coverage of our Squeak/PyPy sprint in Bern we decided that having a general PyPy blog sounds like a good idea. We will try to periodically post about what is going on in the PyPy project, cover sprints and other events where PyPyers are present. If you have any wishes about things we should write about, feel free to leave a comment.

Welcome to the PyPy status blog. After we got a lot of positive feedback about the blog coverage of our Squeak/PyPy sprint in Bern we decided that having a general PyPy blog sounds like a good idea. We will try to periodically post about what is going on in the PyPy project, cover sprints and other events where PyPyers are present. If you have any wishes about things we should write about, feel free to leave a comment.

Even though there is a lot of work down the road, I am genuinely interested in the progress of this project. I'm taking a compilers class at UCR as a CS student so I'm furthering my appreciation of well written compilers.

We had a guest speaker the other day, Jens Palsberg, who created a subset of Java, miniJava, (the language we are writing our compilers for), talk about the future of compilers. He said that the future is in the ability to generate code suitable for multi-threading. With hardware slowing down and resorting to increasing the amount of cores on a die instead of making them faster, this makes sense. I also asked questions about just-in-time compilers and about the possibilities to improve performance beyond current compilers using runtime information.

To see you guys work on attacking those problems using a high-level language like python shows to me that we are getting closer to reaching those goals.

Keep up the good work. This blog is a great idea. I can't wait to use PyPy to speed up all my python based applications in an expedient and robust fashion.